Sounds like PornHub or similar could easily branch into providing a separate service for general videos if they wanted. They already have all this stuff down for the most part.
IMO, it might be wise for Netflix to start their own YouTube-like service. For example, subscribe to Netflix, get access to user-created videos on a separate app. The best part is that users would then generate content for a fraction of what they currently pay to produce content, and they could have basically what YouTube has, but ad-free.
Surely the CDN for that huge streaming library is the expensive part of their infra.
As long as you move a few PB around the globe on your video release date, Netflix is fine.
It's very easy to build a Netflix in comparison to yt.
I would argue that for Netflix going into yt direction would eat up there revenue baseline fast.
More static content than YT. Better viewer:creator ratio. Fewer content headaches. Content moderation is lower volume and amounts to watching the film. And closer to their existing product fit.
It's actually kind of mind-boggling that Netflix hasn't pivoted into a turnkey solution (standard deal + optional financing support + broadcast platform) for mass-market film-making. Everyone's content starved, it's an obvious weakness that Amazon / Disney / ATT are blind to, and somehow Reed Hastings hasn't pushed in that direction. It's literally what Netflix is famous for doing (twice!): be the platform.
I've been mostly hearing the opposite, most people feel like they have more content they want to watch than they have time to.
The key part there is "if they wanted."
Any upstart would have to burn who knows how much capital to try and ramp up, hosting videos for free and getting only a tiny fraction of the ad revenue that Google can extract from a video due to their smaller scale. Even if somebody wanted to subsidize this with reserves or VC funding, the endgame is that they're competing directly against Google, and if faced with actual competition Google can always afford to undercut them until they ran out of reserves or VC funding.
Far better for these sites to claim a niche that Google has no interest in and just fly below the radar.
[0] MindGeek operates under a complex structure of multiple companies in countries such as the British Virgin Islands, Canada, Curaçao, Cyprus, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mauritius, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.[60][8] Its structure has been described as mostly a way to avoid corporate tax by a de facto Canadian company;[8][3][61] with billing companies in Ireland,[62] subsidiaries in Curaçao and holding ones in Cyprus and Luxembourg, all countries that have been identified as tax havens or having lax tax regulations. Canada also has special tax treaties with Luxembourg, the legal headquarters of MindGeek, where a Canadian subsidiary is exempt from taxes paid on royalties to its Luxembourg parent.[8]
Video quality is low.
Video amount should probably be 1000 if not 10000 smaller than yt.
I'm not aware of millions uploading hour and hours of high quality videos to their platform.
I myself only go there for a short period of time.
I know plenty of people who keep streams from yt running in parallel.